The Diamond and Silk disaster in Congress

There were plenty of reasons to criticize lawmakers after this month’s Facebook hearings: too many of them came in unprepared, misunderstood key issues, and failed to extract meaningful concessions from Mark Zuckerberg.

Indeed, the platforms declined the invitation to appear before Congress. And so we were left with the ugly spectacle of white Republican lawmakers pretending to care about elevating the voices of people of color in order to advance a lie about how social media works.

My colleague Adi Robertson captured the madness:

For Republicans, the day was mostly an excuse to lecture Silicon Valley and heap praise on Hardaway and Richardson, albeit not always accurately — Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) addressed a question at one point to “Diamond and Spice.” It’s really not clear what transpired between the vloggers and Facebook’s policy team, and a ThinkProgress analysis found that their traffic dips were probably tied to broad algorithm changes. But the company’s letter dubbing them “unsafe to the community,” even if it was completely retracted, sounds plausibly sinister.

Diamond and Silk escalated this complaint into a sweeping conspiracy where Mark Zuckerberg interfered in the 2018 elections (we’re not sure which ones) by manipulating conservative users’ advertising preferences so they’d be targeted with liberal ads. They proceeded to get into shouting matches with various committee members, as representatives pressed the pair about receiving money from the Trump campaign — something they claimed under oath had never happened, before admitting that they’d been reimbursed for plane tickets. “We can see that you do look at fake news,” Richardson sneered at Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), when he read out a line from an official Trump campaign finance filing, stating that Diamond and Silk had been paid for consulting. “Are you calling this FEC document fake?” Jeffries asked.

For their part, Diamond and Silk seem to have perjured themselves. I’m glad Congress is beginning to understand the power of the social platforms, but this week Republicans gave us the most disingenuous possible reading of it.

Meanwhile, Facebook did attend a hearing this week with a UK parliamentary committee looking at the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company sent its CTO, Mike Schroepfer, to take the beating.

[Member of Parliament Damian] Collins asked why Facebook didn’t spot Russia’s use of the social network to target voters sooner. “We were slow to spot that,” Schroepfer said, adding, “I’m way more disappointed in this than you are.” The claim prompted laughs from around the interview room and a subsequent apology from the CTO. “It’s a high bar,” Collins replied.

The committee heard a version of what we’ve heard in the United States:

Facebook said it will make sure political ads on its platform will be vetted and transparent in time for England and Northern Ireland’s 2019 local elections, that only verified accounts will be allowed to pay for political ads, and users will be able to view all promotions paid for by a campaign — not just those targeted to them based on their demographic or “likes.”

If Congress was a clown show, Parliament was at least asking the right questions. Schroepfer promised to follow up with the committee on almost 40 items. And Americans hoping for sustained scrutiny on their social media platforms find themselves once again relying on Europe to take the lead.

Democracy

Everyone should read a trio of stories from Amanda Taub and Max Fisher based on their trip to Sri Lanka. The reports are rich in detail and illustrate how a failure to anticipate the consequences of social networking can have deadly consequences.

1. Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match. It’s been a week and I still can’t get this story out of my mind. Rumors spread on Facebook lead to ethnic violence into Sri Lanka. And Facebook’s response doesn’t go much beyond “we remove such content as soon as we’re made aware of it.”

Facebook did not create Sri Lanka’s history of ethnic distrust any more than it created anti-Rohingya sentiment in Myanmar.

But the platform, by supercharging content that taps into tribal identity, can upset fragile communal balances. In India, Facebook-based misinformation has been linked repeatedly to religious violence, including riots in 2012 that left several dead, foretelling what has since become a wider trend.

“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

Yes, he’d stopped the mob. But he also recited to us, as unvarnished truth, some of the very anti-Muslim rumors that had spread in viral Facebook memes before the attack. Muslim shop owners put chemicals in bras to sterilize Buddhist women. Muslim doctors sterilized Buddhist patients without their knowledge. Muslims in government were secret extremists.

How did he know this? “The whole country heard about this” on Facebook, he answered. Had he discussed this with his constituents in the run-up to the violence? Of course.

3. Does Facebook Just Harbor Extremists? Or Does It Create Them? In this piece, they examine how Facebook can push ordinary users to extremes. "The problem arises when negative, tribal emotions begin to permeate social media,” they write, “which increasingly dominates users’ lives and therefore shapes their perceptions of the world offline.”

Everyday users might not intend to participate in online outrage, much less lead it. But the incentive structures and social cues of algorithm-driven social media sites like Facebook can train them over time — perhaps without their awareness — to pump up the anger and fear. Eventually, feeding into one another, users arrive at hate speech on their own. Extremism, in other words, can emerge organically.

We saw this firsthand in the small town of Digana, Sri Lanka, a week after anti-Muslim mobs had torn through.

If you imagine that threat of regulation and increased lobbying spending have a direct correlation, you are correct:

Facebook Inc. set a lobbying record in the first three months, just as an uproar flared up the leak of data on millions of users’ without their permission.

The company spent $3.3 million, according to disclosures filed with the government Friday, up from the $3.21 million it spent in the same period a year earlier, which represented the company’s prior high.

One big question coming out of Cambridge Analytica was whether anyone would lose their job over it. Well, VP of US public policy Erin Egan lost her job this week … and was named chief privacy officer, so who knows what any of this means:

Former Republican FCC chair Kevin Martin, who has worked at Facebook for years, will become interim Vice President of U.S. Public Policy — even as many predict Democrats could take one or both chambers of Congress.

He replaces Erin Egan, who will continue to serve as the company’s Chief Privacy Officer. She has served in both roles for years.

Ben Elgin and Selina Wang look at the fake news landscape on Facebook and find that Facebook is making progress, even if the headline suggests otherwise.

The company’s actions have indeed walloped some publishers. Freedom Daily, for instance, had been garnering millions of Facebook “engagements” – the total of likes, comments and shares – each month, according to BuzzSumo, a social-media analytics company owned by Brandwatch. (One story falsely claimed the driver who plowed into counter-protesters in Charlottesville was a Democrat and “Antifa terrorist.” Another bogus story said Muslim refugees working at Starbucks likely contaminated coffee with fecal matter.)

This year, the site’s traffic has plunged. By early March, it shut down.

The minute-long spot starts with a look back at Facebook’s older interface and tries to humanize what we do on the network by connecting posts back to real people, all with sad piano music playing overtop.

Here’s a good Nellie Bowles profile of Campbell Brown, Facebook’s refreshingly blunt head of news partnerships:

A year and a half into her tenure, Ms. Brown, who became a school-choice activist with close ties to conservative politics after her TV career, is emerging as a fiery negotiator for her vision of Facebook as a publishing platform, according to interviews with more than 30 people who work or who regularly interact with her. This month, Hollywood Reporter named Ms. Brown one of this year’s 35 most powerful New York media figures.

More meaningful interactions! More love for local news! These were supposed to be some of the positive changes associated with the algorithm change Facebook announced early this year. But so far the local news love is lacking: Pete Brown, senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, crunched the numbers and found that “11 out of 13 regional metros averaged fewer interactions per post in the nine weeks following the pro-local algorithm change than in the two years before.” And the 13 regional metros that Brown looked at? They’re the papers that are participating in Facebook’s Local News Subscription Accelerator.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal began rather late in this quarter, but it doesn’t yet seem to have had any effect on Facebook’s business. (Revenue is a lagging indicator when it comes to trouble, though. Ask BlackBerry!)

The Silicon Valley company reported a 63 increase in profit and a 49 percent jump in revenue for the first quarter, driven by continued growth in its mobile advertising business. Mobile advertising now represents more than 90 percent of Facebook’s advertising revenue.

The company also said that it added 70 million monthly active users last quarter, bringing it to 2.2 billion monthly active users as of March.

Here’s a powerful Russell Brandom story about gay dating apps in Egypt, which police have infiltrated and used to round up and torture queer people. It’s a terrifying example of how social media and authoritarian governments can intersect, and it deserves more attention. Developers are doing what little they can to make the apps safer:

Since October, Grindr users in 130 countries have been able to change the way the app appears on the home screen, replacing the Grindr icon and name with an inconspicuous calculator app or other utility. Grindr also now features an option for a PIN, too, so that even if the phone is unlocked, the app won’t open without an additional passcode. If you’re stopped at a checkpoint (a common occurrence in countries like Lebanon), police won’t be able to spot Grindr by flipping through your phone. And if co-workers or suspicious parents do catch on to the masked app, they won’t be able to open it without your permission.

One fun thing I got to do in New York this week was play with Spectacles version 2.0. I was a fan of the original, which struck me as a fun toy and a worthy experiment. The latest version is more refined, maybe a little more fun, but still makes it too hard to transfer snaps from glasses to your phone.

One subject I tend to be obsessed with is “who does Evan Spiegel grant interviews to,” and as a follow-up question, “why am I not one of those people.” In any case, he spoke to Jessi Hempel at Wired for an interview that seems like it lasted about 2 minutes, based on the volume and depth of quotes here. (He’s promoting ‘Snappables,’ an augmented reality gaming platform the company is working on.)

Snapchat is attempting to piece together that next computing platform independently, from the bottom up by creating hardware and software separately. “We decouple them so that they’re all allowed to develop on their own until they come together,” Spiegel said. “Over the next decade or so, the way that these pieces fit together will probably be what defines our company.”

Will Oremus traces the history of the idea that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” The basic idea originated as a critique of television, he writes. And in any case, he’s not buying it.

It also seems to carry a strange implication that everything would be solved if only we had to pay for the privilege of social networking. The idea that paying for a product ensures better treatment holds some appeal at a time when the likes of Apple and Netflix are enjoying success without resorting to intrusive ads. Of course, not everyone can afford Apple products, or Netflix for that matter. And there are plenty of companies making paid products that don’t have their customers’ best interests in mind, either. Think of cigarette companies intentionally making their products more addictive, or Volkswagen cheating on emissions tests. In an early rebuttal to the “you’re the product” meme that’s still well worth reading, Derek Powazek favorably contrasted Tumblr’s customer service to that of Comcast, which charges people plenty of money while still treating them like dirt.

If you watched all 10 hours of this month’s Facebook hearings, you’ll likely love this surreal bad lip reading. Zuckerberg takes his licks, as you’d expect, but the satirists here reserve just as much absurdity for lawmakers, who come across exactly as strange as they did in real life.